Lightroom 4. Books.

Can anyone recommend a book they have found useful in learning Lightroom 4. The Adobe videos are useful up to a point. The help system I have found frustrating. I note a post here in January pointing at some free videos but I think that must have changed as you have to buy credits there now. I was thinking about this book -
The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4 Book by Martin Evening.

Re: Lightroom 4. Books.

Hi John,

I have the book you mention - The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4 Book by Martin Evening - and I found it very useful. It describes all the features of the program thoroughly and gives some advice on using it effectively; its focus though is on learning the features.

I used LR for nearly a year before buying the book (after watching lots of videos, mainly by Julianne Kost), and still learned a lot from it.

Re: Lightroom 4. Books.

Originally Posted by Glenn NK

I have three or four Martin Evening books (started from the beginning).
Evening tends to demonstrate the principals.
Kelby tends to show you how to do a specific task.
Both approaches have advantages/disadvantages. I find that when I know the principles, I can solve most any problem.

Glenn's right about Evening; that's why I bought his book. I'm also curious to know how far one can "push" LR creatively. (It is just a RAW processor after all...); I think I'm quite competent with LR but don't know if I could do more with it. So perhaps Kelby or another would be a good additional book to complement Evening.

Re: Lightroom 4. Books.

Although I am a big fan of books I find video tutorials a better learning source for image editing. Probably the visual part of my brain works better for that.

I suggest you consider some advanced tutorials like kelbytraining.com or lynda.com first and then buy a not-basic lightroom book. You can buy only one or two months subscription to see if that works for you. The first one offers a limited free trial period you can also try. These tutorials are usually better that the free ones in youtube and elsewhere (not always) in terms of cohesion and completeness.

As for books I have The Digital Negative by Jeff Schewe but I suggest it's for not suitable for beginners (not sure about your current skills).

Re: Lightroom 4. Books.

I signed up for Lynda.com last May and find that some of the tutorials are really, really helpful while some others are a bit too simple (but I suspect that is a reflection of where I am on my personal learning curve and they are very good for running through all the tools of the software, one by one). There are more than 20 hours of Lightroom4 videos including 2.5 hours of integration of Lightroom and Photoshop on Lynda.com.

I am also half way through Jeff Schewe's The Digital Negative and find it extremely useful from a concept to application approach, and it is packed with information I haven't read elsewhere (I agree that it is probably not for beginners). At the moment it is my favorite book and I am looking forward to reading his companion book due out pretty soon, as I recall.

I just signed up for kelbytraining.com (today, as a matter of fact) so I can't comment on it yet.

Martin Evening is very well regarded from the reviews I have read (although I haven't started the book I bought by him yet) and Scott Kelby lays things out so they are easy to understand, from my experience.

I guess I am really just confirming what others have said. I think they have hit it on the head on all counts. So many things to read/view, so little time....

Re: Lightroom 4. Books.

Thank you everyone for your comments and helpful advice. I have tried YouTube for Lightroom 4 instruction, and as mentioned here there is some good stuff but also a lot of not so useful stuff, after a while you start to lose the will to live sorting through it. I have found the "official" Adobe material to be the best, (by Julianne Kost and Matt Kloskowski for example) but as I said it only takes you so far. I think the books by Martin Evening and Scott Kelby are the way to go.
The official Adobe material can be found here - http://tv.adobe.com/show/learn-lightroom-4/
Once again thank you to everyone.

Re: Lightroom 4. Books.

One neat thing about Scott Kelby's workflow is that he does a lot of his post production manipulation in Adobe Camera Raw. ACR-7 comes with LR-4 and PS CS6 and I think that the ACR is identical on both programs. At first, I resisted the changes in ACR-7 but, I have begun to feel comfortable with it and like it even better than the ACR-6 which came with LR-3 and PS CS5.